Nigger this, nigger that, you motherfucker

More on the queer complications of language…. I’m too young to have paid attention to the career of Richard Pryor, I guess. So I’ve never really listened to him, although a writer for the gay Blacklight magazine quoted Pryor from an old interview: "Straight black people often have a hard time dealing with gays. All my life I've seen that macho shit in the black neighborhoods, where you try to eliminate someone mentally, to get out of dealing with them by saying, 'Oh, you're a faggot, you don't know from nothing.'"

But this isn’t about comics and fag humour. Pryor used the word “nigger” like there was no tomorrow.

Recalls one fan: "When I was coming of age in the late 1960s and '70s, the release of a new Richard Pryor album was a major event. We ran to the record store to purchase a copy of ‘That Nigger's Crazy’ or ‘Bicentennial Nigger,’ seduced by the brashness of the titles, the daring cover art, even before we even heard all that funny, cold-blooded, true shit Pryor was talking. He was an antidote to Richard Nixon, the Moral Majority, the decline of mass movements for social change. Richard Pryor kept it real, and then some."

And from NPR, in one of many homages to the comedian, who died Saturday: "Pryor used the N-word in a way it had not been used before on stage: openly, and before mixed audiences, according to Randall Kennedy… author of the book ‘Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.’

"‘He showed the wide variety of ways in which nigger could be used. Nigger as insult, nigger as window on racism, nigger as a sort of ironic play on race relations, nigger as term of endearment.’ But after a trip to Africa, where Pryor said he saw the beauty of blackness, he stopped using the word."